Electronic printing devices have undergone leaps of innovation over the years to hone ubiquitous printing capabilities via Internet. One such electronic printing device is a multifunctional device that incorporates multiple functionalities, such as printing, scanning, and copying, in a single device. The multifunctional device generally includes input trays (e.g., a main tray and an auxiliary tray) for receiving media in the form of sheets that are routed along a media path to an output tray. The media path is coupled to a print engine that transfers an image, which is received as a print job, on to the media. The print job may be referred as a stream of data including print instructions and image data, expressed in a page description language, and having one or more pages.
Multifunctional devices can execute print jobs received from multiple sources such as a server, a scanner, a portable storage unit (e.g., a pen drive), and a networked user device (e.g., mobile phone). The multifunctional devices are typically adapted to manage multiple print jobs in an order that defines a print queue for sequential printing. However, a print job may go into a held state after one or more pages of the print job are marked by the print engine to stall further printing due to, for example, insufficiency of printing resources required for executing the print job. Such insufficiency of resources may correspond to: (1) an obstruction in the media path between an input media tray and a designated output media tray associated with the print job, (2) lack of printing resources such as media, ink or toners, and finishing units (e.g., stapler pins, hard cover, plastic spiral, etc.), or (3) inaccessible or blocked output media tray. Consequently, a next print job in the print queue has to wait indefinitely until a held print job is completed or deleted, which allows to maintain the integrity of the print job but causes inconvenience to other users, reduces full machine utilization, hampers productivity, and degrades the overall user experience.
Conventional approaches allow a user to intentionally interrupt an ongoing or active print job and manipulate the print queue for execution of an intended print job. While these approaches allow for selective execution of different print jobs, they are unable to tackle an ongoing print flow disruption by the held print job due to the required attributes being unavailable to execute the next print job. As a result, the execution of print jobs in the print queue is indefinitely delayed, thereby hampering the print productivity and compromising on user satisfaction from the multifunctional device.
Therefore, there exists a need for a robust technique that allows an incoming print job to be executed bypassing an earlier active print job that is in a held state.